Bandcamp Lijkschouwer is Dutch for coroner, the four members go by initials, and the third album was recorded, mixed and mastered at the Tonmeisterei in Oldenburg by two people credited as Dave and Role. Everything about the presentation says the band would rather you listened to the room than to them.
The room is the achievement. Across forty two minutes the snare trails a tail long enough to read as a hall rather than a studio, the kick works through the chest instead of through a clicked front edge, and the growls are placed inside the reverb with the guitars instead of sitting on top of the mix. Death-sludge that sounds like a physical space is harder to get right than it sounds, and this band has it.
The same room for forty two minutes
What the measurements show is how little anything else moves. The tonal centre of each track sits within about two hundred hertz of every other. The share of energy in the midrange varies by under two points across the whole record. The weight at the bottom varies by under two points. The distance between the peaks and the average level holds within a single decibel from the first track to the last.
That consistency is the point of this style, and no reasonable listener comes to funeral-leaning death-doom for variety of colour. But the master is also pushed harder than the writing needs. Across six tracks the peaks sit only ten to eleven decibels above the average, which is tight for music built on slow accumulation, and it is the one place where the record works against its own best quality. A band that spent this much effort building a room then compressed some of the air out of it.
What “Irredeemable” proves
Track three runs nine minutes and spends the first three of them on clean guitar in that same enormous space before anything heavy arrives. It is the widest track on the album, and it is also the one where the production and the writing finally pull in the same direction: the quiet section is quiet, the collapse is a collapse, and the reverb has something to do besides hold up a wall.
“Querencia” does a smaller version at the end, breaking at around the six minute mark into bare clean guitar. Those two moments are where the record stops being an atmosphere and becomes a piece of music.
So
Worth hearing, and three out of five here is our normal mark for a record that does its job. What holds it there is not the playing or the sound, both of which are genuinely good, but the fact that the album commits to one setting and only steps outside it twice in forty two minutes. “Irredeemable” shows the band knows exactly how to use the space they built. Four of the six tracks around it do not get the chance. If the next record has three more moments like track three, the rating moves. Start there and let the rest fill in behind it.
The record is unusually uniform on every axis except length. Dynamic range across the six tracks runs 11.8, 12.4, 15.2, 13.7, 8.8 and 10.0 decibels, a median of 12.1 that puts the album 22nd of the fifty one in our measurement set, while the widest single track here ranks only 40th of fifty one, so nothing on it is extreme by our standards. Everything else is close to frozen: tonal centres between 2241 and 2447 hertz, midrange between 43.7 and 45.1 percent, the band under two hundred and fifty hertz between 23.7 and 25.6, and treble between 17.1 and 18.7. Crest values hold between 10.1 and 11.1 decibels above average with average levels between minus 10.1 and minus 11.2, which is a loud master for this tempo and the one measurement that works against the record. “Irredeemable” at nine minutes is the widest at 15.2 and carries the highest crest, which is what a track with a three minute clean opening looks like from here.
Standout tracks: Irredeemable, Querencia, Colours of Woe
